Warren ends 2020 presidential bid after Super Tuesday rout

WASHINGTON (AP) — Elizabeth Warren, who electrified progressives with her “plan for everything” and strong message of economic populism, dropped out of the Democratic presidential race on Thursday, according to a person familiar with her plans. The exit came days after the onetime front-runner couldn’t win a single Super Tuesday state, not even her own.

The
person wasn’t authorized to speak about Warren’s intentions and talked
to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.

Warren’s exit extinguished hopes that Democrats would get another try at putting a woman up against President Donald Trump.

For
much of the past year, the Massachusetts senator’s campaign had all the
markers of success, robust poll numbers, impressive fundraising and a
sprawling political infrastructure that featured staffers on the ground
across the country. She was squeezed out, though, by Vermont Sen. Bernie
Sanders, who had an immovable base of voters she needed to advance.

Warren
never finished higher than third in the first four states and was
routed on Super Tuesday, failing to win any of the 14 states voting and
placing an embarrassing third in Massachusetts, behind former Vice
President Joe Biden and Sanders.

Her
exit from the race following Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s departure leaves the
Democratic field with just one female candidate: Hawaii Rep. Tulsi
Gabbard, who has collected only one delegate toward the nomination. It
was an unexpected twist for a party that had used the votes and energy
of women to retake control of the House, primarily with female
candidates, just two years ago.

Warren’s
campaign began with enormous promise that she could carry that momentum
into the presidential race. Last summer, she drew tens of thousands of
supporters to Manhattan’s Washington Square Park, a scene that was
repeated in places like Washington state and Minnesota.

She
had a compelling message, calling for “structural change” to the
American political system to reorder the nation’s economy in the name of
fairness. She had a signature populist proposal for a 2% wealth tax she
wanted to impose on households worth more than $50 million that
prompted chants of “Two cents! Two cents!” at rallies across the
country.

Warren,
70, began her White House bid polling near the back of an impossibly
crowded field, used wonky policy prowess to rocket to front-runner
status by the fall, then saw her support evaporate almost as quickly.

Her
candidacy appeared seriously damaged almost before it started after she
released a DNA test in response to goading by Trump to prove she had
Native American ancestry. Instead of quieting critics who had questioned
her claims, however, the test offended many tribal leaders who rejected
undergoing the genetic test as culturally insensitive, and it didn’t
stop Trump and other Republicans from gleefully deriding her as
“Pocahontas.”

Warren
also lost her finance director over her refusal to attend large
fundraisers, long considered the financial life blood of national
campaigns. Still, she distinguished herself by releasing dozens of
detailed proposals on all sorts of policies from cancelling college debt
to protecting oceans to containing the coronavirus. Warren also was
able to build an impressive campaign war chest relying on mostly small
donations that poured in from across the country — erasing the deficit
created by refusing to court big, traditional donors.

As
her polling began improving through the summer. Warren appeared to
further hit her stride as she hammered the idea that more moderate
Democratic candidates, including Biden, weren’t ambitious enough to roll
back Trump’s policies and were too reliant on political consultants and
fickle polling. And she drew strength in the #MeToo era, especially
after a wave of female candidates helped Democrats take control of the
U.S. House in 2018.

But
Warren couldn’t consolidate the support of the Democratic Party’s most
liberal wing against the race’s other top progressive, Sanders. Both
supported universal, government-sponsored health care under a “Medicare
for All” program, tuition-free public college and aggressive climate
change fighting measures as part of the “Green New Deal” while forgoing
big fundraisers in favor of small donations fueled by the internet.

Warren’s
poll numbers began to slip after a series of debates when she
repeatedly refused to answer direct questions about if she’d have to
raise taxes on the middle class to pay for Medicare for All. Her top
advisers were slow to catch on that not providing more details looked to
voters like a major oversight for a candidate who proudly had so many
other policy plans.

When
Warren finally moved to correct the problem, her support eroded
further. She moved away from a full endorsement of Medicare for All,
announcing that she’d work with Congress to transition the country to
the program over three years. In the meantime, she said, many Americans
could “choose” to remain with their current, private health insurance
plans, which most people have through their employers. Biden and other
rivals pounced, calling Warren a flip-flopper, and her standing with
progressives sagged.

Sanders,
meanwhile, wasted little time capitalizing on the contrast by boasting
that he would ship a full Medicare for All program for congressional
approval during his first week in the White House. After long avoiding
direct conflict, Warren and Sanders clashed in January after she said
Sanders had suggested during a private meeting in 2018 that a woman
couldn’t win the White House. Sanders denied that, and Warren refused to
shake his outstretched hand after a debate in Iowa.

Leaning
hard into the gender issue only saw Warren’s support sink further
heading into Iowa’s leadoff caucus, however. But even as her momentum
was slipping away, Warren still boasted impressive campaign
infrastructure in that state and well beyond. Her army of volunteers and
staffers looked so formidable that even other presidential candidates
were envious.

Just
before Iowa, her campaign released a memo detailing its 1,000-plus
staffers nationwide and pledging a long-haul strategy that would lead to
victories in the primary and the general election. Bracing for a poor
finish in New Hampshire, her campaign issued another memo again urging
supporters to stay focus on the long game — but also expressly spelling
out the weaknesses of Sanders, Biden and Pete Buttigieg, the former
mayor of South Bend, Indiana, in ways the senator herself rarely did.

Warren
got a foil for all of her opposition to powerful billionaires when
former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg entered the race. During a debate
in Las Vegas just before Nevada’s caucus, Warren hammered Bloomberg and
the mayor’s lackluster response touched off events that ended with him
leaving the race on Wednesday.

For
Warren, That led to a sharp rise in fundraising, but didn’t translate
to electoral success. She tried to stress her ability to unite the
fractured Democratic party, but that message fell flat.

By
South Carolina, an outside political group began pouring more than $11
million into TV advertising on Warren’s behalf, forcing her to say that,
although she rejected super PACs, she’d accept their help as long as
other candidates did. Her campaign shifted strategy again, saying it was
betting on a contested convention.

Still
the longer Warren stayed in the race, the more questions she faced
about why she was doing so with little hope of winning — and she started
to sound like a candidate who was slowly coming to terms with that.

“I’m
not somebody who has been looking at myself in the mirror since I was
12 years old saying, ‘You should run for president,’” Warren said aboard
her campaign bus on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, previewing a
ceasing of campaigning that wasn’t yet official. “I started running for
office later than anyone who is in this, so it was never about the
office — it was about what we could do to repair our economy, what we
could do to mend a democracy that’s being pulled apart. That’s what I
want to see happen, and I just want to see it happen.”

She vowed to fight on saying, “I cannot say, for all those little girls, this got hard and I quit. My job is to persist.”

But even that seemed impossible after a Super Tuesday drubbing that included her home state.